Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive by Hala Halim (review)

Hala Halim’s Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive conducts a meticulous critique of the Eurocentric and colonial discourse formation of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. This formation, as Halim maintains, confines cosmopolites in Alexandria only to Europeans, mainly French, English, and Greek living in the city, while occluding Egyptian Arabs’ existence. Throughout the book, Halim elaborates this idea through “comparative study of literary representation in different genres that also relate them to other genres” (3). In her radical and subversive scrutiny she reappraises the so-called modern canonical Alexandrian triumvirate of European writers, Constantine Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell, while challenging the views of major Western critics such as Robert Liddell, Edmund Keeley, Jane Lagoudis Pinchin, Philip Mansel, and Michael Haag. What is most noteworthy in the book is her introduction to the hitherto unnoticed—or less known— non-European Alexandrian artists such as Bernard de Zogheb, Ayoub Sinano, Edwar al-Kharrat, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, Tarique Imam, Yousry Nasrallah, and Ibrahim El Batout. Halim opens up a new research trajectory in the field of Alexandrian and Middle East cosmopolitanism.

Halim commences her epic journey of postcolonial reconsideration of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism with a critical revision of the last two decades’ redefinition of cosmopolitanism across the Western academic disciplines of humanities and the social sciences. She confidently claims that despite all efforts to reevaluate cosmopolitanism in the changing international political [End Page e-3] milieu of decolonization, scholars still support the “Eurocentric genealogy of cosmopolitanism,” which means that they are not free from Stoic and/or Kantian philosophy (5, 6). Pointing out limitations in the positions of Martha Nussbaum, Scott Malcomson, and the 2000 special issue of Public Culture, Halim proposes a radical reconsideration of the cosmopolitan on an “ecumenical and anti-Eurocentric” basis which, she believes, could be done by revisiting the Western discourse of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism (7). Halim upholds that exactly this Eurocentric discourse has contributed to christening Alexandria as the most cosmopolitan city in the Middle East. She exposes the Eurocentric view for labeling anything European and Hellenistic as an indication of civilization while demonizing anything Egyptian/Arabic as a sign of barbarism.

The chapter on Cavafy offers a new angle to his major poems and prose by focusing on the poet’s relationship with Egyptian Arabs in Alexandria and generally in the Middle East. Halim establishes her critical ground by distancing her reading from Cavafian scholars’ stamping of the poet as the figurehead of Alexandrian Hellenism. Her examination is cautiously performed in order not to simplify the complexities and subtleties of Cavafy’s responses to the Egyptian Arabic voices and the European imperial power. She draws examples from the poet’s previously overlooked essay “On the Intellectual Affinity of Egypt and the West” (1928), which demonstrates his interest in forging and improving relations between Western and Egyptian writers (115). Locating Cavafy’s works between “Egyptian Arabophone literary production” and the European art, Halim interprets Cavafy’s oeuvre as one that carries “transcultural and hybridized Greek textuality” and as one of “the Greek diaspora in Egypt” (116–17). Even though Halim’s criticism of the previous critics’ colonial readings of Cavafy is one of the many merits of the present book, she does not consider the two recent books on the Alexandrian poet’s uncomfortable relationship with the European (particularly British) colonial powers: Peter Jeffreys’s Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2008) and Martin McKinsey’s Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010). While Jeffreys’s book offers a political reading of Hellenism and Orientalism in Cavafy’s relationship with Forster, Martin’s monograph applies postcolonial studies in reevaluating Hellenism in Cavafy’s poems.

The following chapter expounds Forster’s dual “positionality” (177). This idea has also been explored by Forsterian scholars (see Peter Morey’s [End Page e-4] “Postcolonial Forster” in The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). She cogently maintains...